The two most prominent components of Emily Madden’s life, golf and engineering, are intertwined in more ways than one. The fact that she studies engineering because of a golf scholarship is the easiest connection to make, but there’s a more existential connection, too.

“There’s a lot of mental strategy that goes into [golf] and that might be related to my more engineering brain too, ya know, the mathematics and physics and all that stuff,” she said in an interview at the Center for Media Innovation Oct. 18.

The senior civil engineering major from Elizabeth, Pennsylvania is fresh off an internship with the Port Authority of Allegheny County. She worked on the incline, the T system and more. This is the latest milestone in Madden’s engineering education, which she has been mentally pursuing since she was in high school.

“I chose engineering because I thought it would be cool maybe 10, 15, 20 years down the road if I could tell family members, ‘Hey, I was part of this large infrastructure that was built,’” she said.

In recent years, there have been pushes for more young people to seek STEM-field professions, and concurrent to that, pushes directed at young women.

“Being a woman in a STEM program, if I could see other women in younger generations step up and do the same thing and do a ‘man’s job, in a man’s world,’ that’s something really cool, something to be a part of,” she said.

While she has sometimes found herself as the only woman in some of her classes, Madden feels supported by her family.

“My family’s pretty blue-collared people,” she said, “My dad works in a steel mill, my mom works in a local hospital. For their daughter to be pursuing engineering, I think they’re proud.”